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In The Myth of Sisyphus, Camus describes the experience of the one for whom the illusions of rationality have been peeled back: “In a universe suddenly divested of illusions and lights, man feels an alien, a stranger. His exile is without remedy since he is deprived of the memory of a lost home or the hope of a promised land.”
The condition is exile, and happiness is embracing it. Relinquishing any nostalgia for home and any hope of arrival, the “absurd one” is the one who manages to make exile what he always wanted.
Like Camus, we sometimes try to remake despair as joy. Never feeling at home, we turn our estrangement into a philosophy: “The road is life” is a motto you try to convince yourself is true when you never feel at home with yourself.
If there’s a map inscribed in the human heart that shows where home is, the fact that we haven’t yet arrived doesn’t make it a fiction. It might just mean there’s a way we haven’t tried.
As Heidegger would put it—in a way he learned from Augustine—I am absorbed by “everydayness”; I give myself over to those “producers of bustling activity” who are more than happy to take the burden of selfhood off my hands.
We learn to forget our alienation by letting ourselves be taken over by the distractions and entertainments and chatter of the world.
We trade one sort of self-alienation for another that gives the illusion of homey comfort: “You belong here” is the lie told to us by everyone from Disney to Vegas.
We try to cover up not knowing who we are by letting everyone else sell us an identity, or at least a...
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What Camus is honest about is what Heidegger calls Angst, the anxiety that emerges in such moments, calling into question everything that we consider to be the homey faux-comfort of our absorption in the world.
When we’ve fooled ourselves into thinking we’re at home with distraction, tricked ourselves into feeling “settled” only because we’ve sold our home-hunger for entertainments, then the irruption of the uncanny, a sense of not-at-home-ness, becomes a gift that creates an opening to once again face the question of who we are.
Angst’s disturbing disclosure of meaninglessness is a door to walk through: it opens onto the possibility of finding yourself.
The goal isn’t returning home but being welcomed home in a place you weren’t born, arriving in a strange land and being told, “You belong here.”
A refugee spirituality does not make false promises for the present. It is not a prosperity gospel of peace and joy in the present.
To be a mestizo is to belong to two realities and at the same time not to belong to either of them.
Joy is arriving at the home you’ve never been to.
Your hometown—where joy is found—is a place you arrive at and immediately feel “at home” in, even though you’ve never been there before.
The “authentic happy life,” Augustine concludes, is “to set one’s joy on you, grounded in you and caused by you. That is the real thing, and there is no other.”30 Those found by God find in him “the joy that you yourself are to them.”
Like the exhausted refugee, fatigued by vulnerability, what we crave is rest. “You have made us for yourself, and our heart is restless until it rests in you.”31 This insight in the opening paragraph of the Confessions is echoed at the very end of book 13: “‘Lord God, grant us peace; for you have given us all things’ (Isa. 26:12), the peace of quietness, the peace of the sabbath.”
Joy, for Augustine, is characterized by a quietude that is the opposite of anxiety—the exhale of someone who has been holding her breath out of fear or worry or insecurity.
It’s not that the temporal, material world is foreign to me, as if I’m a fallen angel who’s been punished by being embodied (which is closer to the Platonism Augustine ultimately refused); it’s that I’ve been made for enchantment.
The question is whether this tension of the between becomes a catalyst for pilgrimage—prompting me, like Abraham, to answer the call and “Go!”—or whether I try to decamp in that distant country, turning my exile into arrival, suppressing my sense that there must be something more, that another shore is calling.
For Augustine, so much of our restlessness and disappointment is the result of trying to convince ourselves that we’re already home.
While it was Ambrose who broke through Augustine’s deepest intellectual skepticism about Christianity, what he found in Ambrose, he tells us, was a father who showed kindness, welcomed him, enfolded him.35 Augustine, unsettled and anxious, an African outsider in Milan, was welcomed by Ambrose as by an ambassador of the country for which he was made, for which he had been sighing all these years.
He emerged from the waters of baptism as an émigré with a new passport declaring his heavenly citizenship (Phil. 3:20).
Augustine, in his writings, would often use the Latin word peregrinatio to speak of the Christian life, and most translations of his work render the cognates of peregrinatio in terms of pilgrimage.
God is the country we’re looking for, “that place where true consolation of our migration is found.”
Peregrinatio is a social event.
It is a city, a civitas, Sean Hannan argues, but perhaps we’d do better to look for a model of such a city not in New York or Milan but in the refugee camps in our world today, each its own metropolis: “Think of Dadaab in Kenya (population: 245,000), Bidi-Bidi in Uganda (285,000), and (somewhat closer to Augustine’s Thagaste) the Sahrawi camps in the Algerian Maghreb (50,000–100,000, depending on which authority you consult).”
As he once told his congregation, “There are three types of people who take refuge in the church: the good who are fleeing the wicked; the wicked fleeing from the good; and the wicked who are fleeing from the wicked. How can such a knot be untangled? It’s better to give sanctuary to one and all.”
It’s no mistake that God enjoins his peregrinating people to be especially attuned to the fate of the vulnerable: widows, orphans, and strangers.
Augustine is the perfect guy for the road because he’s been on it and is sympathetic to all our angst on the way.
If we worship the automobile it’s because it’s the glossy god that gives us our freedom. So we build altars to the Corvette, the Mustang, and the motorcycle as vehicles that liberate us, symbols of our autonomy.
we call such freedom “authenticity” and don’t even realize how much this is a trickle-down effect from existentialist philosophers like Heidegger and Sartre.
Being-towards-death, Heidegger says, is to live in anticipation, to live toward possibility.4 It’s the realization that what’s possible is up to me and only me (my “ownmost” possibility, as Heidegger puts it): there is a potential for me to be if only I will realize it, if I will answer the “call.”5 But this call isn’t coming from someone else. It isn’t just another mode of conformity. I’m calling myself.
What he envisioned as freedom—the removal of constraints—started to feel like a punishment.
Freedom to be myself starts to feel like losing myself, dissolving, my own identity slipping between my fingers.
“I loved my own ways, not yours,” Augustine realized. “The liberty I loved was merely that of a runaway.”
If he had hoped to find himself—and freedom—by escaping the constraints of home, by the time he’s in Milan, Augustine realizes he is his own worst master.
His only hope is to escape, but he has concluded that is impossible. He is Sisyphus. But he gave himself the stone.
“I sighed after such freedom,” he recalls, “but was bound not by an iron imposed by anyone else but by the iron of my own choice.”
The freedom he chased was a chain in disguise. What Augustine offers now is a rereading of his own so-called freedom.
I am my own jailer.
To read Augustine in the twenty-first century is to gain a vantage point that makes all of our freedom look like addiction.
When freedom is mere voluntariness, without further orientation or goals, then my choice is just another means by which I’m trying to look for satisfaction.
reductive and recycled core: Desire. Use. Repeat.”
As a clinician later described it to her, addiction always ends up as a “narrowing of repertoire”: life contracts to a fixation on what you can’t live without, and the rhythms of a day, a life, are engineered to secure this thing that never satisfies, is never enough.
Coming to the end of oneself is the way out of disordered freedom.
If freedom is going to be more than mere freedom from, if freedom is the power of freedom for, then I have to trade autonomy for a different kind of dependence.
A reflection from Augustine is poignant and encouraging here: “To desire the aid of grace is the beginning of grace.”
If you come to the end of yourself and wonder if there’s help and are surprised to find yourself at times hoping for a grace from beyond, it’s a sign that grace is already at work.
